I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices. But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly. I think it is just as important to sing about beautiful mornings as it is to talk about slums. I just couldn’t write anything without hope in it.
~ Oscar Hammerstein
After such a gorgeous sunrise yesterday, this morning’s sitting felt quite drab by comparison. But as I dropped the concept of like-dislike, the clouds became interesting as they moved about, became better defined, and the sun still somehow managed to find a break in the clouds. And we so badly need the rain!
What is beautiful? My favorite author and philosopher Alan Watts often suggests that life is little more than a series of comparisons. We can’t have dark without light, fronts without backs, good without evil. “Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
David Hume notes: Beauty is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.
And D. H. Lawrence : Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is that our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best.
So, I hope today, you’ll search out the beauty in all things. Drop the comparison. A circle has no beginning.
༺♥༻
